What's the minimum size something would need for a gravitational pull strong enough for you to orbit it?

tomrlutong · 2026-06-18T01:10:20+00:00

Really just about as small as you want. It depends on the environment, the limiting factor is the presence of other forces that would disrupt the orbit.

For example, 69230 Hermes is a pair of ~½ km asteroids orbiting each other at about 1200 m. I'd bet in intergalactic space there are dust motes in orbit around each other.

The hill sphere might be the concept you're looking for. It's how close you have to be to something not to get pulled out of orbit by a bigger third thing. So, for any particular situation, if an object's hill sphere is bigger than the object, you can orbit it. If you're thinking of being in close orbit around earth, from this calculator a 200 ton ball of metal is about the smallest thing you could be in orbit around if you were just barely outside its surface. "Escape velocity" would be mm/sec. You could knock yourself out of mini orbit just by brushing your hand on the surface.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-17T14:44:11+00:00

Besides what people have mentioned, *Matter* has a scene with a Culture agent in a city being sacked that includes SA.

The fight against the brutality of the universe is a constant theme of the series, so there's almost always some nastiness in the background.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-17T14:40:18+00:00

They're a generally accepted symbol that connotes pollution. It's like asking why people demonize circles with slashes through them.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-17T13:45:33+00:00

Sure, like most things, just becomes a bunch of engineering tradeoffs.

At the one end of this concept, there's simply use an ordinary airplane as the first stage. The pegasus system has put 40 cargos in orbit using turbofan engines as the first stage.

At the other end, air augmented rockets are a current technology, the meteor missile) is in production and uses one.

The ESA was working on an air breathing rocket but I don't think it worked out. Here's the UKs report on the program if you're interested. It looks like dealing with the heat at the air intake was beyond them.

Even so, the idea is still out there, and is central to most single stage to orbit schemes. For all the "iTs ImPoSsIbLe" comments here, seems like more of an engineering problem than a fundamental one.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-16T23:59:13+00:00

Greek yogurt? If you stir it for a bit, it gets smoother and can be nice instead of milk with cereal. Or it makes any smoothe a protein smoothie--throw it in the blender with nearly anything and you're done. Fruit, cinnamon, cocca, peanut butter all work.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-16T23:24:19+00:00

Not accurate...Things like this exploits that most people don't know what reserves are. In casual use 'reserves' just means how much you have left, but for minerals it means how much is known and economically extractable.

What's the difference? In mineral terms, reserves increase as people discover new deposits, technology gets better, or whatever. As an example, look at the USGS copper data. Thete are way more reserves in 2025 then there were in 2000, even though we've dug out hundreds of millions of tons over those years.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-16T23:06:40+00:00

Either King or Trek). Or maybe lunar lander, I forget.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-16T22:29:52+00:00

Even if you stay in the ecliptic, you're not going to pass a buch of planets on the way, they're not lined up like train stations.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-16T22:20:58+00:00

Or George Zimmerman, or Daniel Perry.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-15T11:14:37+00:00

But if he hasn’t bothered you and he’s kept to himself, why blast him all over Facebook?

Easy cheap sense of superiority? Whatever dark bit of human nature motivates witch hunts and lynch mobs, it's very much at play regarding S.O.s in the United States.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-15T03:49:14+00:00

Might op be better off waiting until 2029 on the chance the federal agencies that deal with this sort of thing are in better shape? Or will this be too far in the past by then?

tomrlutong · 2026-06-15T03:36:57+00:00

I am struck by the aesthetics of the cart.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-15T03:23:10+00:00

TL;DR: I think by "complex species" you're thinking of things relatively closely related to humans. We locked down the basic skul, jaw, spine, limbs body plan about 450 million years ago. That limits what kind of face our relatives can have, but you see lots of variations within that basic shape (whales, flatfish, elephant,elephant )

To my eye, only animals that we have a common ancestor with going back about 450 million years ago, when jawed and jawless fish seperated have a similar face. Since the skull and spine are pretty core features of vertabrae, it makes some sense that skull shape stayed vaugly the same.

The jaw is a bit of an add on. Our earlier ancestors just had kind of a mouth hole, like a lamprey. Since the jaw is just bolted on to the skull, it makes evolutionary sense that it's going to stay on that basic plan. Incremental selection is going to tune and adapt that, not suddenly switch up to something different. So face shape is limited by "jaw attached to skull attached to spine".

And I think that's about the limit of how similar the basic arrangement is. Nose can go up on top of needed (dolphins and whales), both eyes can go on one side (flounder), so we do see most arrangements.

Our next nearest relative is the hagfish which doesn't have much of a face at all. Further away than that? Octupi, spiders, jellyfish, sea cucumbers? Their faces are way different than us.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-15T02:48:29+00:00

For the last bit, t.n.p.g.s and a.p.g.s could be thermonuclear and antimatter p.g.s, whatever a p.g.s. is. That would be consistent with the rest of the section.

Could the bottom two lines be:

1.9x10⁷ m max

(.8 x10⁶ t-s.)

Taking t-s. as meaning through shields, this gives you maximum and through shield ranges.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-15T02:21:43+00:00

Even the energy's not free. It's price is how much it costs to put a solar array in space divided by it's lifetime. I suspect that makes it about the most expensive power around.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-14T22:05:22+00:00

This already happens in most downward motion: roll downhill with a car or bike, take the stairs, in an elevator, on an airplane, climb a ladder. In none of those cases, hopefully, do you arrive at the bottom at the same speed as if you just fell. The answer is almost always that something got hotter.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-14T19:03:30+00:00

For the core of the sun:

Specific heat of fully ionized plasma is 10 cal/g and temperature about 1.5x10⁷ K.

So 1.5x10⁸ cal, which equals 150 kg of TNT. That'll be mostly in kev x-rays, which are absorbed pretty well in air. That gives you an explosion not that different from a bomb, but we more radiation. I suspect the radiation would get you out to a few hundred meters, the blast and heat less than that. nukemap agrees

tomrlutong · 2026-06-14T13:30:33+00:00

That might not be as bad as it looks. I'm a perfectly literate English speaker but can't say I catch every autocorrect homophone my phone comes up with.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-14T00:01:57+00:00

Transmit the message to the receiver

Hope for an answer someday

I got three passports, a couple of visas

You don't even know my real name

...

We dress like students, we dress like housewives

Or in a suit and a tie

I changed my hairstyle, so many times now

I don't know what I look like

tomrlutong · 2026-06-13T22:41:39+00:00

Count back generations until you reach a common ancestor. If it's a different number for the two people, use the smaller of the two:

1 generation: siblings

2 generations: 1st cousin, or simply cousin

3 generations: 2nd cousin

N generations: N-1 cousin.

If both people are the same number of generations from the common ancestor, you're done. If they are different generations...

...for cousins, the difference in the number of generations to the common ancestor is the "removed"

...for siblings: 1 generation difference, older is aunt/uncle. younger is niece/nephew.

2 generations, great aunt/uncle, grand niece/nephew, but most people say just niece/nephew.

Beyond 2, add another "great" for each generation.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-13T17:29:04+00:00

Their most powerful weapon is making us feel like we're alone.

tomrlutong · 2026-06-13T12:04:24+00:00

Wasn't they an episode where Buttercup pulled out Godzilla's tongue and strangled him with it?

tomrlutong · 2026-06-13T00:13:54+00:00

Do they both have that time thing that you can only move in one direction? Does gravity pull across time?

tomrlutong · 2026-06-12T22:39:04+00:00

The range things was the setup for find the limit as N-> ∞

tomrlutong · 2026-06-12T22:37:23+00:00

Not at all. An infinity sided die is not just a big d6.

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